Kepler Sends Postcards Home: It's Beautiful Out Here

The Kepler space telescope, which was launched in early March, has taken and sent home its firstimages of the region in the galaxy where it will spend the next three years searching for Earth-like planets. The images sent to NASA show a "vast starry field" in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way galaxy, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. One image shows millions of stars in the craft's full field of view, while two other images zoom in specific sections of that region [Computerworld]. Kepler's primary mission is to survey stars for regular slight dips in their brightness, a sign that an orbiting planet is blocking the star's light [Nature blog]. Eventually, the craft will measure the stars' brightness every half hour. The telescope is designed to observe the same wide field of stars continuously for the length of its mission, providing astronomers with a record of the changes ...